I got to help V. (the biologist) reload the XBT autolauncher the other day. The conditions were pretty good - the waves weren't too big and the boat wasn't rocking much - so I was safe. Even so I had to wear the ridiculous looking orange suit. When the conditions aren't very good it can actually be pretty dangerous. If you're knocked off the ship then you have about three minutes before you go unconscious, which probably isn't long enough for the ship to turn around. But there are safety precautions to make sure nobody goes overboard. If the waves are really bad the captain closes down the deck, like she had to yesterday.
We've arrived at our area of study, the Vacquier fracture zone. Brief geology lesson: spreading centers (such as the Mid-Ocean Ridge in the Atlantic or the East Pacific Rise in the Pacific) are offset by perpendicular transform faults in order to compensate for the spherical geometry of the Earth and make all the plates happy. The transform fault is the active part and the fracture zone refers to the entire structure - both currently and historically active.
We've started zig-zagging to get data for a wider area. The ship motion has been relatively small up to this point in our cruise since we've been traveling with the wind (the winds go clockwise around Antarctica) and therefore with the waves. But now that we're zig-zagging, we're going against the waves, and the ship's been rocking a lot more. We had one 19.94 degree roll last night, and we've had a lot of rolls over 10 degrees.
(originally posted on Livejournal)
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